A major player in law enforcement says it will stop using a method that's been linked to false confessions

You may have never heard of the Reid technique, but chances are
you know how it works.

For more than half a century, it has been the go-to police
interrogation method for squeezing confessions out of suspects.

Its tropes are familiar from any cop show: the claustrophobic
room, the repeated accusations of guilt, the presentation of
evidence — real or invented — and the slow build-up of pressure
that makes admitting a crime seem like the easiest way out.

That’s why it jolted the investigative world this week when one
of the nation’s largest police consulting firms — one that has
trained hundreds of thousands of cops from Chicago to New York
and federal agents at almost every major agency — said it is
tossing out the Reid technique because of the risk of false
confessions.

Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a consulting group that
says it has worked with a majority of U.S. police departments,
said Monday it will stop training detectives in the method it has
taught since 1984.

"Confrontation is not an effective way of getting truthful
information," said Shane Sturman, the company's president and
CEO. “This was a big move for us, but it's a decision that's been
coming for quite some time. More and more of our law enforcement
clients have asked us to remove it from their training based on
all the academic research showing other interrogation styles to
be much less risky."

Research and a spate of exonerations have
shown for years that Reid interrogation tactics and similar
methods can lead to false confessions. But the admission by such
a prominent player in law enforcement was seismic.

"This is big news in the interrogation world," said Steven A.
Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University and an expert
on police interviews.

Joseph P. Buckley, the president of John E. Reid &
Associates, which licenses the Reid method, said Wednesday that
Wicklander-Zulawski’s announcement was “very misleading and
disingenuous.” He said the technique has consistently held up in
court and that it is not “confrontational” except when evidence
already suggests the suspect’s guilt.

Wicklander-Zulawski said it would use the Reid technique only to
educate police on the risk and reality of false confessions.

The method, the company said, "has remained relatively unchanged
since the 1970s, and it… does not reflect updates in our legal
system."

Buckley said that Wicklander-Zulawski has been teaching the 1984
version of the Reid technique, which does not include “any of the
updates or new material that we developed” since then — making it
unfair to suggest that Reid itself is outdated.

The technique was first introduced in the 1940s and 50s by
polygraph expert John Reid, who intended it to be a modern-era
reform — replacing the beatings that police frequently used to
elicit information. His tactics soon became dogma in police
departments and were considered so successful in garnering
confessions that, in its famous 1966 Miranda decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court cited it as a reason why suspects must be warned of
their right against self-incrimination.

But the advent of DNA evidence and advocacy by the Innocence
Project in the 1990s showed that about one-third of exonerations
involve confessions, once believed to be an absolute sign of
guilt. Academics have theories why someone would falsely confess
to a crime, including having a mental disability, being
interviewed without a lawyer or parent in the room, or suffering
through hours or days in jail before questioning.

But the most common factor is the Reid method and its imitators,
experts say, since it can create confirmation bias in the minds
of investigators while overwhelming a suspect to such an extent
that the truth no longer seems like the best option.

Inmates
sit in a classroom at the Orange County jail in Santa Ana,
California May 24, 2011.REUTERS/Lucy
Nicholson

"At some point, the technique itself has to take responsibility,"
said Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice and an expert on police interviews. "What
Wicklander-Zulawski has realized is that once you start down the
road of using trickery and deception, the misuses are inherent in
that. There are no clear lines of, 'This is a good amount of
trickery, and this isn't.'"

Experts are cautiously hopeful that Wicklander-Zulawski's
decision will mark a turning point for interrogation tactics
around the country and hope in-house police training shops will
follow suit.

"We don't know yet how much of the old methods they are going to
shed. Will they also stop teaching police officers that they can
detect liars from truth-tellers based on body language and verbal
cues, which study after study shows are unreliable?" Drizin said.

To Maurice Possley, a journalist who helps maintain a
comprehensive registry of exonerations at the University of
Michigan and has written for The Marshall Project, it's a
big deal either way. "This is not defense attorneys or wrongly
convicted defendants saying it,” he said. “A major player in the
field of law enforcement has stated that this method leads to
false confessions."